Monday, 31 October 2011

I'd like to post this beautiful and poetic forward (I believe it is not really a forward but a for-forward, if that is a real term in bibliographical parlance) by Michel de Certeau from the beginning of his book The Practice of Everyday Life.

The reasons I like it are multifarious: it is inspiring and hopeful (even utopian). It contains the history of the 'man in the crowd' and the metropolitan personality. Also, it heralds the onset of the multitude and introduces the postmodern subject that exists in a textural space. But, I guess, more importantly, it offers up the city to us as an "anonymous subject" in its own right - the city that proffers us a particular appearance that is desirous of political administration, of the streamlining of processes and systems, of geographic zoning and capital accumulation. An appearance that disguises the hidden consequences of social reproduction. One that tells a different tale of the city, if only we can spend the time to reveal it behind the spectacle. One that is open to interpretation.

To the ordinary man.

To a common hero, an ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the streets. In invoking here at the outset of my narratives the absent figure who provides both their beginning and their necessity, I inquire into the desire whose impossible object he represents. What are we asking this oracle whose voice is almost indistinguishable from the rumble of history to license us, to authorize us to say, when we dedicate to him the writing that one formerly offered in praise of the gods or the inspiring muses?

This anonymous hero is very ancient. He is the murmuring voice of societies. In all ages, he comes before texts. He does not expect representations. He squats now at the center of our scientific stages. The floodlights have moved away from the actors who possess proper names
and social blazons, turning first toward the chorus of secondary characters, then settling on the mass of the audience. The increasingly sociological and anthropological perspective of inquiry privileges the anonymous and the everyday in which zoom lenses cut out metonymic
details—parts taken for the whole. Slowly the representatives that formerly symbolized families, groups, and orders disappear from the stage they dominated during the epoch of the name. We witness the advent of the number. It comes along with democracy, the large city, administrations, cybernetics. It is a flexible and continuous mass, woven tight like a fabric with neither rips nor darned patches, a multitude of quantified heroes who lose names and faces as they become the ciphered river of the streets, a mobile language of computations and rationalities that belong to no one.

Wednesday, 26 October 2011

Maps themselves are like laboratories where experimentations on tracings are set in interactions. Thus, here the map is opposed to the structure; it can open itself in all its dimensions; it can also be ripped apart; it can be adapted to all kinds of assemblies. A pragmatic map can be started by an isolated individual or a group, it can be painted on a wall, it can be conceived as a work of art, it can be conducted as a political action or as a mediation. For a type of performance, a particular assemblage of enunciation, or a redundant tracing being given, what is important is determining whether or not it modifies the unconscious map of a local pragmatic competence. (page 172)

Saturday, 22 October 2011

I took this image on the University of Leeds campus this morning while on a psychogeographical trip around St Georges Field cemetery. I then went into the union to get a coffee and picked up the Leeds Student newspaper and found this short article:

On returning home I checked it out on the University of Leeds website, but they are clearly keeping tight-lipped. However, there is much speculation on twitter with #40647 now having its very own hashtag. This is what the University of Leeds official twitter account says in response to all the conjecture: "Lots of you are asking what the 40647 numbers on campus mean. All will be revealed soon..."

Monday, 10 October 2011

This is what the Pro-Chancellor Hubert Stanley Houldsworth said about the university's relationship with its city in The University of Leeds Review: Jubilee Edition (1954):

There must [...] be a strong extra-mural department to take the torch of learning into towns and hamlets around the University; and within the University precincts there must be opportunity for both members and non-members of the University to join together in the cultural pleasures, of music, poetry, and literature, in the appreciation of painting and other works of art, in lectures on general matters, or even in some of the more specialised lectures which, of necessity, must be an attraction to a smaller section. The University must be a focus of learning and cultural life to the whole community. (1954: 47)

We can see Houldsworth's vision for an outreach programme that forges a cultural and educational relationship with the city that bore it. However, this relationship was not just one-sided: the Redbrick universities were meant to be an expression of civic pride and a symbol of national identity to the local citizens. In his article on 'Town and Gown', Houldsworth provides a list of chancellors that preceded him and their achievements that impacted the region. He concludes his text with the motto: "'Town and Gown' in unison is our endeavour. At Leeds, 'Town' helps 'Gown', and 'Gown' helps 'Town'. The contributions of each to the other must continue to grow, to the advantage of each, and, we trust, to the advantage of the world." (1954: 52)

A. N. Shimmin's chapter on Town and Gown (The University of Leeds: The First Half Century) is replete with gifts from notable local businessmen - for example, Edward Baines and Frank Parkinson - whose legacy we are reminded of in the form of existing university buildings that were built in their honour or indeed with their money, as was the case with the Parkinson Building.

Michael Sanderson provides much detail on the University of Leeds and local business in his book The University and British Industry 1850-1970. He discusses the success of the university's early days of specialising in areas of study which enabled them to create alliances with industry, such as industrial chemistry; coal, gas and fuel, tinctorial chemistry for textiles, and textiles and material. (1972: 85-86) Most of Shimmin's discussion on industry appears under his chapter 'The Faculty of Technology'. Broken down into sections on agriculture, mining, textile industries, colour chemistry and dyeing, engineering and leather (which all make up individual departments within the faculty), it becomes apparent how significant for the university this faculty was at the time of his text. These departments still existed in 1954, however today the faculty no longer remains, with those departments that still do exist being made parts of other faculties.

David Jones opens his chapter 'Founders and Benefactors' with the remark: "The civic universities were built upon charity." (1984: 164) While I think this is an overly simplistic statement, it is clear that without endowments from outside the institution that these universities would have not been able to develop and grow. Indeed, were it not for the Clothworkers' generous endowment when Leeds was working towards its university charter, it would not have been granted in 1904. Bruce Truscot's remark that the university's responsibility to industry should be secondary to its pedagogic one does not reflect the blurred boundaries between these two areas, as is clear when it comes to the subjects taught historically at the university of Leeds. If the Redbrick university wished to provide a good education to the local bourgeois, enabling them to become successful businessmen, then educating the sons of local middle-class merchants is both an obligation to local industry and also an educational undertaking. The historical relationship the university has had with trade and industry appears in the legacy of the subjects taught. While in modernity this relationship grew out of a direct response to an economic need which meant the university reacted to the demands of a certain type of knowledge requirement, in postmodernity the university has acquired the mantle of a business-oriented philosophy in its own right, meaning that attempting to demarcate industry and institution as separate entities is a far more complex move. In order to compete in a globalised market the contemporary university is expected to think and operate as if it were a business. This means that it has to be run like one and therefore take up the procedures and practices of commerce.

Reference:
Houldsworth, Hubert, Stanley. 'Town and Gown', The University of Leeds Review: Jubilee Edition (1954), 44-52.
Jones, David R. 1984. The Origins of Civic Universities: Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International).
Sanderson, Michael. 1972. The University and British Industry 1850-1970 (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul).
Shimmin, A.N. 1954. The University of Leeds: The First Half Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Friday, 7 October 2011

It was in the local newspaper, the Leeds Mercury, of 1826 that plans for a university in Leeds first appeared. Its formation was also considered to be a reaction to the Paris Exhibition of 1867, when local businessmen became fearful of foreign competition. (Jones 1984: 91; Sanderson 1972: 66; Taylor 1975: 3) However, it would not be until 1904 that the University of Leeds got its Charter as an independent university. The origins of the university lie in the philanthropic orientation of a number of the founders, including John Marshall, a local MP and pioneer in the area of textiles (flax). In the 19th century, Marshall, inspired by the education system in London, recommended a range of cultural and educational subjects that would be offered to boys in Leeds, enabling them to remain at home and reduce the cost of travel and accommodation. This dream of Marshall's eventually manifest itself in the form of the Yorkshire College in 1874 (this was not a college in the usual sense, but a secondary school with similar aims to that of higher education). As A. J. Taylor explains, the Yorkshire College was part of a "second generation" of colleges that came about as a challenge to the privileges enjoyed by those who could afford Oxford and Cambridge. (1975: 1) It is also important to note that while the forming of the Yorkshire College was a reaction against an exclusive higher education for just the upper classes, the college was providing education for the middle-classes only, in the form of an education for the sons of local merchants in the area of science and the arts. These colleges were a response to the need for an improved technological education to support local industry: in the case of Leeds this was primarily textiles, clothworking and mining.

The early part of 19th century Victorian England saw a raised awareness of class consciousness, with the working classes seeing the apparent polarised positions of themselves and the middle-classes as not just being one of a disparity in wealth but also in literacy. In 1870 the Education Act was formed to provide elementary education for children in Britain, and schools were set up in areas where there had previously been none. But it was not till 1880 that another act was put in place to make education for children compulsory for those aged up to ten years. A number of acts followed, covering older and disabled children.

During this same period the medical school grew out of Leeds General Infirmary (formed in 1767). The Medical School was founded in 1831; its formation stemmed, in part, from the Apothecaries Act of 1815, which meant surgeons needed formal qualifications. Doctors taught in their spare time, often in the evenings at the end of their day working in the infirmary. The Yorkshire College and the Medical School did not amalgamate until 1883-84. Over the next few decades expansion was supported by funding, for example from the Clothworker's Company who maintained a textile department at the college. (Shimmin 1954: 3-13) In 1887 the college in Leeds became part of the Victoria University, which had already existed jointly as Manchester and Liverpool colleges. This meant that finally it received university status and could now endow degrees. But it was not until 1904, following a generous gift of £70,000 from the Clothworker's Company, that full university status was secured. (Shimmin 1954: 28)

While the university had to drop some courses in 1904 in order to be competitive and hone its resources, a post-war run on courses before the 1921-23 slump, followed by economic problems in Japan that benefited the British textile industry, meant that the university expanded rapidly leading up to World War II. (Shimmin 1954: 30-39) This expansion was not only in the case of students and staff, but also in regards to geographical growth. Nevertheless, many of the plans for the post-war development of the university were scuppered by World War II. For example, the Parkinson Building (an art deco, neo-classical building that was designed as the entrance hall to the Brotherton Library) was designed in the 1930s but was not completed till 1951 due to a suspension in building during the war.

References:
Jones, David R. 1984. The Origins of Civic Universities: Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International).
Sanderson, Michael. 1972. The University and British Industry 1850-1970 (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul).
Shimmin, A.N. 1954. The University of Leeds: The First Half Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Taylor, A.J. 1975. 'County College and Civic University: An Introductory Essay', Studies in the History of a University, ed. by P.H.J.H. Gosden and A.J. Taylor (Leeds: E.J. Arnold). pp. 1-41.

Tuesday, 4 October 2011

All great universities have found their being in centres of trade and commerce: the geographical circumstances which have favoured the exchange of goods have been equally hospitable to education and liberal culture. The Universities Oxford and Cambridge established themselves among communities of traders, whose fairs and markets gave itinerant teachers their best chance of finding an audience and making a permanent settlement. . . . In a great commercial capital, the natural reservoir of the industrial energy of a wide area, our University finds its proper place. (Hamilton Thompson cited in Shimmin 1954: xiii)

A. N. Shimmin's book, The University of Leeds: The First Half-Century (1954), written in the university's jubilee year, provides an in-depth history of this period. The other historical analysis solely dedicated to the university is P. H. J. H. Gosden and A. J. Taylor's 1975 edited text Studies in the History of a University, which celebrates the period of 1874 to 1974. My three-part historical summary of the University of Leeds will be taking the perspective of its relationship to the city in which it grew.

The three centuries leading up to the Leeds Charter of incorporation in 1626 saw Leeds being forced to deal with not only a number of crises in the form of multiple infections from the bubonic plague to floods and drought, but also a burgeoning wool industry and the birth of a formalised education system that responded to local needs. What Charles I Charter meant for Leeds, along with its incorporation as a town under the control of a local council, was that it was able to control the quality of the cloth produced there and also in the surrounding area. Dishonourable manufactures could be marginalised due to the new regulations. However, the Charter did not bring with it a Member of Parliament status, nor was the council democratically elected. Following the town's incorporation, later developments included a properly designed reservoir-fed water supply in 1694, and an improved road system to enable the transportation of raw materials and cloth to and from the town.

The history of Leeds tells a story of economic, political and social advancement not dissimilar to many other economic hubs that sprung up in England and whose history can be traced back to pre-Roman times. In the 'Industrial North' its significance as a prominent civic centre and profitable economic region becomes even more apparent in the period that followed. Its civic attitude to education, coupled with the continual need for an improved technology required to maintain the status of the region, lent it to becoming a town fit for a university.

Reference:
Shimmin, A.N. 1954. The University of Leeds: The First Half Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).